Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media report them inadequately. We blog here because our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, New York, Madrid, London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening and why. This ongoing war is killing us.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

27-Feb-14: Finger on trigger, Amnesty fires and again shoots self in foot

Britain's Jewish
Chronicle, has a brief editorial under the heading "Amnesty
report: tawdry and biased" that says in a single paragraph what
rational onlookers ought to know before diving into AI's litany of innuendo,
accusations and distortions:

Amnesty International
was once widely respected for its work campaigning for prisoners of conscience.
Its transformation into a caricature of an agenda-driven Israel-obsessed NGO is
thus something of a tragedy. Across the globe, prisoners of conscience remain
locked away for no reason other than the threat their thoughts pose to despotic
regimes. There is still a vital need for the kind of work undertaken by the old
Amnesty. The real tragedy, of course, is not Amnesty’s descent into hard core
anti-Israel campaigning; it is the fact that life is so cheap in the Middle
East. In regimes across the region, human beings are tortured, imprisoned and
killed at the whim of governments and religious extremists. Genuine democracy
and the rule of law is almost non-existent in the Middle East. Almost — because
there is one state in which it is the very basis of existence. And yet it is
that state, Israel, which is the focus of Amnesty’s tawdry report. Cobbled
together from unverified and contradictory sources, Trigger Happy — even the
name gives away Amnesty’s true agenda — discredits only the organisation which
has published it. [Jewish Chronicle editorial, February 26, 2014]

We have only managed a quick read-through this morning, but can't
help noticing it includes 32 mentions of the Tamimi tribe which proudly claims as its own a hugely-celebrated
convicted mass-murderer. And it refers to Nabi Saleh no
fewer than 25 times. That's the name of a dusty, undistinguished place north of
Jerusalem about which we wrote last year: see "17-Mar-13: A little village in the
hills, and the monsters it spawns".
Nabi Saleh has brazenly re-invented itself as a symbol of the human rights
movement, providing a platform for individuals like Bassem Tamimi,
photographed in the report over a caption that honours him with the title
"a human rights defender", who are thoroughly and successfully
exploiting it. A year ago, a New York
Times Magazine cover story said Nabi
Saleh has "achieved a measure of cachet
among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in
Mexico in the 1990s”.

But thinking of Nabi Saleh and the Tamimis as being part of the
human rights industry involves taking an extremely selective view of the
evidence, and ignoring large parts of it.

Nabi Saleh in the NYT: "Great" setting for
Amnesty's defence of human rights. For a more factual
background, see what we wrote

For instance, you can look at the village's entry in Wikipedia
which paints its 550 residents innotably gentle terms. Centred on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we
encounter in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it
was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the
Turks ruled the area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation
that started in 1948; then declined when Israel took control of the West Bank
in 1967, and flourished and multiplied in the past two decades. Today, it’s the
scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s
English-language version, a place where things are done to passive
inhabitants and forno apparent reason.

But there's an entirely
different emphasis when you go to the Arabic-language version of
Wikipedia which is not a direct translation of the English version. It's created by different people for a different audience and
different sensibilities.

The Arabic Wikipedia entry
depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that
boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds
of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom”.
The most prominentof the prisoners (that's Wikipedia's description) is a woman
called Ahlam. Her surname is shared with almost every other inhabitant of the
village: Tamimi.

One of the Tamimis ignored in Amnesty's paean. This Tamimi
is now a free citizen of Jordan from where she can afford
the luxury of being 'modest' about 'her' massacre
[Source Video]

Ahlam Tamimi is in
fact the self-confessed engineer and planner of a bloody terrorist attack. By
her own account and after several scouting forays, Tamimi selected a target:
the Sbarro restaurant in the heart of Jerusalem, on a hot August afternoon in
2001. She chose it, she has said on video, because she knew it would be
teeming at the appointed hour with women and children. She brought the bomb,
enhanced with nails and bolts to maximize the carnage, from Ramallah across the
Qalandia security checkpoint and into Israel’s capital. Israeli soldiers still
waived females through without inspection in those days.

None of this is mentioned in today's Amnesty International report.
Being as fair as we can, it's possible that this is because, being fully aware
of the background and having decided it was of no relevance to Nabi Saleh's
newly-crafted status as a Mecca of protest, Amnesty's editors decided not to
trouble their readers. Or it may be that they don't know. Or care.

NGO Monitor, based here in
Jerusalem, exists to rigorously review the actions, research and funding of
groups like - and including - Amnesty International. (Their tag line: Making NGOs Accountable.) Via a press release yesterday, they offer up some insights
that may help a person decide how much goodwill to ascribe to today's Amnesty report:

"Trigger Happy" repeats
Amnesty’s previous calls for political warfare against Israel and in
particular, an arms embargo.

Its accusations
are "reckless, blatantly biased, and reflect the lack of a
credible research fact-finding methodology”. They also demonstrate
once again Amnesty's disproportionate and ideological obsession with
Israel”.

“Amnesty
lacks the expertise and credibility to analyze or assign blame for deaths
in the context of violent confrontations in the West Bank. As in the past,
the allegations in this report repeat unverifiable Palestinian ‘testimony’”.

Amnesty
International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty admitted as much just two
weeks ago. In a February 10, 2014 interview with Al Jazeera, Shetty acknowledged that “we are not an expert
(sic) on military matters. So we don’t want to, kind of, pontificate on
issues we don’t really understand.”

No definitions or
comparative data are provided to support Amnesty’s politicized allegations
that Israeli forces are “trigger happy” and “reckless.” In fact, a
review of police conduct around the world reveals that Israeli police and
military conduct is far more restrained, considering the constant state of
armed conflict and the sheer number of lethal situations that justify the
use of deadly force, including violent riots and terror attacks.

As NGO
Monitor has previously shown, Amnesty’s so-called research team on Israel
comprises two individuals with backgrounds in anti-Israel political activism,
not military and legal expertise.

Prof.
Gerald Steinberg, who heads NGO Monitor, concludes on a note that we sincerely
endorse:

Amnesty
International should be ashamed of its role in exploiting the moral foundations
of universal human rights to wage political warfare against Israel.

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THIS ONGOING WAR is not part of the activity of the Malki Foundation which was founded by us, Frimet and Arnold Roth of Jerusalem, on September 9, 2001. But it is inspired by the same tragic circumstances. The Malki Foundation (also known by its Hebrew name: Keren Malki) is a memorial to the life of our daughter, Malki. She's in the photo below this paragraph. Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre in the centre of Jerusalem carried out by Hamas.

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Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media often report them inadequately. Our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, in New York, in Madrid, in London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening. This ongoing war is killing us.